Minjee Kim
Personal Statement:
I first got drawn into the ways in which real estate development affects urban planning and vice versa when I started working at the City of Cambridge’s Community Development Department in Massachusetts. Conflicts of interests around land development, especially when the scale is large, were intense, real, and seemingly irreconcilable, and more often than not, for-profit real estate development was considered to be antithetical to progressive planning values. My work in response focuses on identifying how planners and policymakers can harness the forces of real estate development to further progressive planning values while making sure that cities get their fair share of benefits from the development activities. My dissertation identified and analyzed how major U.S. cities have been frequently negotiating zoning to create and capture value from real estate developments and the policies and conditions under which planners can promote better planning outcomes for those negotiated developments.
Education:
Bachelor of Architecture: Yonsei University. 2011. Architectural Design
Masters: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2013. Master in Urban Planning
PhD: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2019. Urban and Regional Planning
Research Activites:
Large-scale land developments
Value capture
Land use and zoning
Socially-responsible real estate development
Opportunity Zones
Selected Presentations:
Minjee Kim, 2019. “Value Capture by Zoning: how U.S. local governments use land use regulation to generate public benefit from real estate developments.” (Under progress)
Minjee Kim, 2019. “Politics of Negotiated Developments: when does public participation matter in negotiated development deals?” (Under progress)
Minjee Kim, 2018. “Negotiated Developments: gains and losses of negotiating zoning on a project-by-project basis.” (Under review)
Hee-jin Yang, Minjee Kim, Mack-Joong Choi, 2015. “Regulating Chain Stores to Protect Local Businesses: A Comparative Case Study of the Legislative Frameworks in the U.S. and Korea.” Journal of the Korean Urban Management Association 28 (2): 127-144